What is MMR?

Match Making Rating is a system in League of Legends that determines the amount of League Points, or LP, you gain or lose after every game. Do well against opponents with better ratings than you to increase your rating quickly. Lose against lower ranked opponents, and you’ll find yourself struggling to improve your rating at all.

Looking to get a better grip on what's what with your MMR? We’ll take you through the basics.

Why is this important to know?

In theory, knowing how MMR helps you figure out how fast or slow you’ll be able to climb from Iron to Challenger.

If your MMR is higher than your current rank in League of Legends, you would be earning more League Points from winning games and lose less in defeat, making this the fastest way to improve your rank. However, players with lower Match Making Ratings than their current rank earn less League Points while losing more than they earn.

In order to check your MMR, best way is to check how much LP you gain or lose after every game. This should give you a rough indication of your rating and how you’re doing.

Different types of LP

Depending on how you’re doing, you’ll be earning different amounts of LP after each game. These can be split in to three groups – high, normal and low LP.

Earning between 22 to 40+ LP after winning a game is an indicator that your MMR is higher than your current rank. You’re well on your way to being promoted to the next division, and losing games has little to no penalties on your rating – for now.

Earning between 17 to 22 points indicates that your MMR is within the normal range. This also means that you’ll be matched against opponents with ranks similar or identical to yours.

Earning 14 to 17 points after each game means your MMR is lower than your rank. You’re losing more LP than you’re gaining, which puts you at risk of being demoted to a lower rank. You’ll want to break your losing streak as fast as possible.

How to improve MMR

Improving your MMR can be quite the undertaking. Having a low MMR means that you’ve been playing below average compared to other people in your division. Either you’ve been victim to long losing streaks or your individual performance has been lacking. Here are a few tips to help you turn your luck around:

• Start winning. This goes without saying, but you’ll need to start turning losses into wins to keep from being demoted. Learn from your mistakes, turn losses into lessons and keep improving on your weaknesses.
• Duo with someone that has a higher rank or MMR. Some call this boosting, we call it beating the system. Whatever you call it, it’s a great way to prevent relegation.
• At the start of a new season, MMR has a soft reset. This is great for players with low LP, as this allows them to gain more LP than usual. When the season starts, get a winning streak going as soon as possible.

Use placement matches to boost MMR. Since these type of matches affects your MMR significantly, being able to succeed in these matches with wins will be the fastest way to a rank boost.

Popular misconceptions about MMR

League decay won’t affect your MMR despite what people believe. Not playing League of Legends in hopes of resetting your rating won’t have any effect on your MMR. Instead, when you start playing again it’ll be as if nothing happened.

Dodging a game won’t affect your MMR either. Dodging in League of Legends means that you’re actively leaving the game ahead of time - some believe that if you dodge during champion selection lets you improve the LP gains or losses you’re experiencing. However, that’s not the case. Instead, you can look forward to a tax of 3 LP and a timed penalty.